Archive for the ‘Moskvich’ tag

We’re constantly fascinated by Russian vehicles here, but what would it really be like to restore and own one here in the United States? Especially before the fall of the Soviet Union? To answer that question, Special Interest Autos turned to Gary Bricken, who provided this account of owning a Moskvich 407 for SIA #115, February 1990.

Things got a little weird in Russia about 10 years ago. It was the equivalent of our custom van era, when the the first generation to come of age after glasnost combined with the nouveau riche, started having access to Western idioms and created wild graphics, bizarre customs and over-the-top conversions.

Because the country had limited Internet penetration and we don’t have a library of Russian customizing magazines floating around, it can be tough to pin down any one car. So when I was looking at some old bookmarks and saw “six-wheeled Moskvich,” I thought it’d be worth seeing if I could turn anything up.

What I found was one Алексей Кононец – Alexei Kononets – and his Moscow-based custom house Манон и Ко, or Manon and Co. Between 1999 and 2003 I’ve found four customs from him – three Moskvichs and a shorty Mercedes-Benz 190E.

Тёма (“Subject,” above, named for his dog) I think from 2002 is the best-documented. It’s a 1955 (maybe) Moskvich 412 with a tri-axle conversion and saxaphone for a horn. Build videos show it appears to have been done in aluminum, not glass.

Контрастъ (“Contrast”), 1999, is a Moskvich 401, which I believe he’s indicated uses almost entirely stock materials, except for seats.

Since then he’s been quiet, but the Contrast video from 2010 shows three of them, including the latest, an insanely cool all-alloy Moskvich 401 coupe, I think called Леденец, Candy. If you know anyone involved in the Moscow custom scene, I’d love to learn more about it. The other cars are novelties, but this is serious business. There’s shaky video from 2009 of it on what I believe is his YouTube channel. A translation of an interview at a show where he displayed all three indicates these were not only not customer cars, but not for sale. Better translations of the names or anything else are welcome.

One thing we don’t see often here in the States is advertising for Soviet-era automobiles, though Paul Bellefeuille recently came through with this ad for the Moskvich 408 sedan from the 1966 issue of Sputnik, a sort of Reader’s Digest knock-off published by the Novosti Press Agency in a number of different languages, including English. Tellingly, the Moskvich ad is one of only eight advertisements in the entire 240-page issue and the only automotive ad.

Introduced in 1964, the 408 – like its predecessor, the 407 – would become one of the most well-known Soviet cars outside of Russia, with sales in Britain, France, Belgium and the Scandinavian lands as well as to the various countries behind the Iron Curtain. In his book, “Cars of the Soviet Union: A Definitive History,” Andy Thompson described the 408 as “an ideal accompaniment to growing post-war prosperity, and it was a serious contender in export markets across the world.” This during a mid-1960s boom in Soviet automobile exports. It used a typical rear-wheel-drive platform with a 50hp 1358cc overhead-valve four-cylinder that evolved from the pre-war Opel engine that Moskvich bought the rights to when the company was founded in 1945, but much more was made of the fact that the 408 carried much crisper, up-to-date styling and that it was the first Soviet car to include a number of passive safety features, including seat belts, crumple zones, a padded dashboard and dual-circuit braking. By 1966, the success of the 408 and its overhead-cam sibling, the 412, convinced the Soviet government to invest in the Moskvich factory and increase production to 200,000 cars per year. The two cars soldiered on through facelifts until they were replaced by the Moskvich 2138 and 2140 in 1976.